Audely Bensen Writes

This might not be much of a review: in short, I adored this book. I might pull it right back off the shelf and read it over again. This is one of those stories where every line, ever word, has weight, where you feel the prose under your skin. After reading this, I don't have any better sense of how to do it, but it feels like a lesson: don't add words just for distance, just to hit an arbitrary goal. Make them count.  

This week I read The Rage of Dragons , by Evan Winter. While it took me a while to sink in to, once I was hooked I was in! I'm looking forward to the sequel, which comes out about a week after my birthday (and just might be my birthday gift to myself!). How I felt about this book changed drastically as I read, so I'm going to try to organize this review around those reactions. Warning--there will be spoilers! 1. The comps. This book has a definite Game of Thrones vibe, with the second-world, the dragons, the war. And I didn't particularly like GoT. In fact, given those basic similarities, I'm not even sure why I picked up this book. However, Rage of Dragons had one shining difference from GoT -- for the most part, this is a single POV story. And I liked it! We still get a sense of the sweeping world and warring factions, even though we're only seeing the world from a single person's point of view. There were a few odd chapters from a different viewpoint, and I...